{"product_id":"barbara-isbn-9781662602870","title":"Barbara","description":"\u003cb\u003eLike Nolan’s \u003ci\u003eOppenheimer\u003c\/i\u003e by way of Lucia Berlin, a radiant novel tracking the lifecycle of a silver screen starlet rising against the backdrop of the Atomic Age.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBarbara is born shortly before World War II and lives through the conflict as a desert child trailing her father, an engineer in the famed and infamous Manhattan Project. When Barbara is thirteen, her beautiful, sensitive mother commits suicide. From that point on, these twin poles—the historic and the personal, the political and the violently intimate—vie for control of Barbara’s consciousness.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs Barbara grows up and becomes a successful actress, traveling the world between film sets and love affairs, she takes on and sheds various roles—vampire’s victim and frontier prostitute; a saint and a bored housewife. She marries and divorces and marries again, the second time to a visionary director who proves to be the love of her life. Though they are not faithful to each other, their relationship provides the most enduring anchor in a remarkable life turbulent with fiction.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJoni Murphy’s \u003ci\u003eBarbara\u003c\/i\u003e is a deep character study of a woman losing hold and recapturing her identity through the art and technology of moviemaking. Through an intimate first-person perspective, the novel follows Barbara as she navigates decades and genres—from austere 1950s family dramas to countercultural 1970s gothics—glimpsing herself in the reflective and deadly shards of the long 20th Century.\"Barbara examines the masks we assume and the lies we tell ourselves to muddle through life . . . Murphy’s even-keeled prose smooths Barbara’s recollections into one hypnotic narrative. Even though Barbara tells us there is no climax to her story, we read on, expecting an explosion.\"\u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003eGrace Byron, \u003ci\u003eBOMB\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Joni Murphy’s blisteringly beautiful third novel \u003ci\u003eBarbara \u003c\/i\u003etraces her titular protagonist’s relationship to the atomic bomb, acting, and an assortment of affairs . . . [A] captivating book about the performance of femininity, the illusory magic of cinema, and the geopolitical landscape of mid-20th century America.\"\u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003eHannah Bonner, \u003ci\u003eHyperallergic\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Restless and inquisitive, \u003ci\u003eBarbara\u003c\/i\u003e is acutely sensitive to time, irony, the zeitgeist, metaphorical dimensions of filmmaking and nuclear physics, and power dynamics personal and professional. Murphy’s atmospheric, Didionesque portrait of a creatively brilliant and cruelly underestimated 'permanent outsider' is exquisitely perceptive and lushly resonant.\"\u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003eDonna Seaman, \u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e (starred review)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Elegant . . . The prose, particularly the descriptions of acting and filmmaking, is exceptional. Readers will enjoy this atmospheric work.\"\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eBarbara\u003c\/i\u003e is an entrancing novel of contrapuntal virtuosity. Its time signatures—the present tense of cinema, the radioactive half-lives of geopolitics and memory, the ticking time-bomb by which a woman comes to know herself—reflect the twentieth century as we have never really known it . . . Uncannily alive, \u003ci\u003eBarbara\u003c\/i\u003e gets under your skin.\"\u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003eAriana Reines, author of A Sand Book\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Sensuous and sexy, vivid and tactile—\u003ci\u003eBarbara\u003c\/i\u003e is one of the most beautifully written novels I’ve read in a long time. In it, Joni Murphy expertly captures both the melancholic pains and the hedonistic pleasures of a life spent making art.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003eLaura Adamczyk, author of \u003ci\u003eIsland City \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eHardly Children\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This book is like a hologram—an image, an image, an image, pointing through inner and outer spaces, through time, to the silhouette of a woman who lived once, in three dimensions, and who will live on in every reader’s memory. Beautiful and radioactive and sly.\"\u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003eSean Michaels, author of \u003ci\u003eDo You Remember Being Born?\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Barbara is an American girl with a black hole at her center, a maid smoking out a bathroom window, a vampiric film director, a perfect and suicidal mother, the patron saint of miners and bomb-makers. Moving an unmapped course through time and fictions, Joni Murphy’s \u003ci\u003eBarbara\u003c\/i\u003e opens dimensions behind the actor’s returning stare.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003eDeragh Campbell\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"I suspect every reader would see something different in Barbara, which, for all its rich allusiveness, feels strikingly distinct.\" —\u003cb\u003eMarisa Grizenko, \u003ci\u003eThe Ex-Puritan\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eJoni Murphy is a writer from New Mexico who lives in New York. Her debut novel, \u003ci\u003eDouble Teenage,\u003c\/i\u003e was published in 2016. It was named one of the \u003ci\u003eGlobe and Mail\u003c\/i\u003e's 100 Best Books of 2016. Her second novel, \u003ci\u003eTalking Animals\u003c\/i\u003e, was published in 2020 from FSG Originals.","brand":"Astra House","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301923639525,"sku":"NP9781662602870","price":28.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781662602870.jpg?v=1767722156","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/barbara-isbn-9781662602870","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}